Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Staunton, May 17 – Russian commentators
and officials have downplayed or even denied the existence of an ethnic
component of last weekend’s clash in a Moscow cemetery that left at least three
dead, 26 hospitalized and dozens arrested, an approach that will make it even
more difficult for the country to deal with its ethnic problems, according to
Aleksey Malashenko.

The Moscow Carnegie specialist on
ethnicity says the clashes at the cemetery involved banditry, business, and
ethnicity, but ignoring the last not only makes it more likely that there will
be more such conflicts in the future but also that the Russian authorities will
not be able to effectively combat terrorism (echo.msk.ru/blog/malashenko/1766500-echo/).

The situation arose, he says,
because Chechen and Daghestani “criminal groups” demanded that the Tajiks
working at the cemetery, many of whom were in Moscow illegally, pay 90 percent
of their fees and wages to the Chechens and Daghestanis. Not surprisingly, the
Tajiks refused, and the North Caucasians came with guns to try to enforce their
will.

The Russian media have generally called
the defenders of the cemetery “’Asiatics,’” without specifying their exact nationality,
and they have failed to name the nationalities of the attackers from the
Caucasus, thus leaving the impression that the fight was between illegal
immigrants and some group of “’Russian citizens.’”

This is very strange and suggests
that those on the attack may have expected an understanding attitude and even
support from the cemetery managers or others further up the line or
alternatively that such groups from the North Caucasus now feel beyond the
reach of Russian law, the Moscow expert says.

Political figures contributed to
this misunderstanding by arguing almost unanimously that “the incident at the
Khovan Cemetery does not have an ethnic coloration.” That is wrong, Malashenko
says, and “one must not ignore the nationality factor” in such situations or one
is likely to make errors in judgment about how to control the situation.

To be sure, he continues, “in
certain situations” like this one, it may not be profitably to divide up the
explanation between business and simply bandit fights and inter-ethnic
tension.All of this is too
interconnected,” but nonetheless, ethnicity is part and parcel of such clashes
and must be acknowledged.

There is also the danger, Malashenko
says, that “the authorities will try to link this clash to extremism, to ISIS
which is banned in Russia and so on because for them it is customary to ascribe
their own mistakes to the machinations of external forces.” That may be even
more likely in this case because it occurred at the same time as the clashes in
Derbent.

But “one way or another, the clashes at the cemetery show
that the authorities who are taken u with the struggle with terrorism are far
from being completely nformed abut what is happening in the immigrant milieu
and thus are not capable of preventing critical situations from arising in a
timely fashion.”

And
that in turn, Malashenko warns, “inevitably will lead to the further growth in
migrantophobia which is already high and not only in Moscow but more likely
across the entire country.”